Quotes about wax
page 2

“The Queen of England has more cause to procure the preservation of the Low Countries in their ancient estate in the obedience of the house of Burgundy than any other place hath…Now if the Low Countries should either be subdued to the Spaniards or possessed by the French, England cannot continue this manner of league. For if the Spaniard shall possess this country by conquest, as otherwise they cannot, then must they also govern it as conquers—that is build in every country and special towns, forts and castles which must be kept and guarded with Spaniards…To maintain these the King must continue great taxes…and there will be no reason to stop him but he will set what tax he listeth upon the commodities of England and so shall England wax poor to make him rich. And then England will have no remedy.”

William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley (1520–1598) English statesman

Memorandum from approximately the beginning of 1576.
Conyers Read, Lord Burghley and Queen Elizabeth (London: Jonathan Cape, 1960), p. 166.

Housing, Country

“[W]hat good to us is the gods' knowledge if we can't get it from them? How could one communicate with the gods? Our ancestors (while they were alive!) stumbled on an extremely ingenious solution: divination.

We all know how hard it is to make the major decisions of life: should I hang tough or admit my transgression, should I move or stay in my present position, should I go to war or not, should I follow my heart or my head? We still haven't figured out any satisfactory systematic way of deciding these things. Anything that can relieve the burden of figuring out how to make these hard calls is bound to be an attractive idea.

Consider flipping a coin, for instance. Why do we do it? To take away the burden of having to find a reason for choosing A over B. We like to have reasons for what we do, but sometimes nothing sufficiently persuasive comes to mind, and we recognize that we have to decide soon, so we concoct a little gadget, an external thing that will make the decision for us. But if the decision is about something momentous, like whether to go to war, or marry, or confess, anything like flipping a coin would be just too, well, flippant.

In such a case, choosing for no good reason would be too obviously a sign of incompetence, and, besides, if the decision is really that important, once the coin has landed you'll have to confront the further choice: should you honor your just-avowed commitment to be bound by the flip of the coin, or should you reconsider? Faced with such quandaries, we recognize the need for some treatment stronger than a coin flip. Something more ceremonial, more impressive, like divination, which not only tells you what to do, but gives you a reason (if you squint just right and use your imagination).

Scholars have uncovered a comically variegated profusion of ancient ways of delegating important decisions to uncontrollable externalities. Instead of flipping a coin, you can flip arrows (belomancy) or rods (rhabdomancy) or bones or cards (sortilege), and instead of looking at tea leaves (tasseography), you can examine the livers of sacrificed animals (hepatoscopy) or other entrails (haruspicy) or melted wax poured into water (ceroscopy). Then there is moleosophy (divination by blemishes), myomancy (divination by rodent behavior), nephomancy (divination by clouds), and of course the old favorites, numerology and astrology, among dozens of others.”

Daniel Dennett book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Breaking the Spell (2006)

Idea, Life, God, War

“Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed
the floor.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

"You and Me and P. B. Shelley" http://books.google.com/books?id=zixbAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Life+is+not+having+been+told+that+the+man+has+just+waxed+the+floor%22&pg=PA5#v=onepage <br class="br">Good Intentions (1942)

Life

“One of the charms of Africa, is the long settled periods of pure unclouded sky, in which the sun rises and sets with no flaming splashes of vivid colours, but by gentle, imperceptible gradations of pure light, waning or waxing.”

Robert Erskine Childers (1870–1922) Irish nationalist and author

"In the Ranks of the C.I.V.", by Erskine Childers, Smith & Elder and Co. (London, 1901), p. 127.
Literary Years and War (1900-1918)

Light, Sun

“The worst fear that I have about this people is that they will get rich in this country, forget God and his people, wax fat, and kick themselves out of the Church and go to hell. This people will stand mobbing, robbing, poverty and all manner of persecution, and be true. My greater fear for them is that they cannot stand wealth; and yet they have to be tried with riches, for they will become the richest people on this earth.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Preston Nibley, Brigham Young, the Man and His Work, 128.
Attributed

God, People, Fear, Hell

“Socialism is very properly recognized by the capitalist class as the one cloud upon the horizon which portends an end to the system in which they have waxed fat, insolent and despotic through the exploitation of their countless .”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

Outlook for Socialism in the United States (1900)
Context: Of course, Socialism is violently denounced by the capitalist press and by all the brood of subsidized contributors to magazine literature, but this only confirms the view that the advance of Socialism is very properly recognized by the capitalist class as the one cloud upon the horizon which portends an end to the system in which they have waxed fat, insolent and despotic through the exploitation of their countless.

“Time waxing old can many a lesson teach.”

Aeschylus Prometheus Bound

Variant translations:
Time brings all things to pass.
Time as he grows old teaches all things.
Source: Prometheus Bound, line 981 (tr. E. H. Plumptre).

Time

“Consciousness even in my sleep changes primary colors.
The features of my face melt like a wax doll in the fire.
And who can consent to see in the mirror the mere face of man?”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

"Rivers Grow Small" (1963), trans. Czesław Miłosz
Bobo's Metamorphosis (1965)

Color, Sleep, Change

“Time, waxing old, doth all things purify.”

Aeschylus Eumenides

Source: Oresteia (458 BC), Eumenides, line 286 (tr. Anna Swanwick)

Time

“It is not necessary to ask whether soul and body are one, just as it is not necessary to ask whether the wax and its shape are one, nor generally whether the matter of each thing and that of which it is the matter are one. For even if one and being are spoken of in several ways, what is properly so spoken of is the actuality.”

Aristotle book On the Soul

De Anima ii 1, 412b6–9: About the Mind–body problem
De Anima

Way, Soul

“When the sad sun sinks,
It shall pierce through the body of wax till it shrinks!”

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) French Symbolist poet

Nurse.
Hérodiade (1898)
Context: When the sad sun sinks,
It shall pierce through the body of wax till it shrinks!
No sunset, but the red awakening
Of the last day concluding everything
Struggles so sadly that time disappears,
The redness of apocalypse, whose tears
Fall on the child, exiled to her own proud
Heart, as the swan makes its plumage a shroud
For its eyes, the old swan, and is carried away
From the plumage of grief to the eternal highway
Of its hopes, where it looks on the diamonds divine
Of a moribund star, which never more shall shine!

Sadness, Sun

“Till then these sound opinions have taken firm root in you, and you have gained a measure of strength for your security, I counsel you to be cautious in associating with the uninstructed. Else whatever impressions you receive upon the tablets of your mind in the School will day by day melt and disappear, like wax in the sun. Withdraw then somewhere far from the sun, while you have these waxen sentiments.”

Epictetus (50–138) philosopher from Ancient Greece

107
Golden Sayings of Epictetus

School, Sun

“So basically what I think is that in a free society, different people will have lots of different sexual lifestyles. Some people will want to settle down and get married, and that’s fine. Some people will wanna have a fucking baby, and that’s also fine—someone needs to have the fucking babies. But some people won’t want to do that: some people will wanna dip their balls in hot wax and pour wolf’s milk all over a stranger’s face, and that’s fine, too. Some people won’t want to have sex or romantic relationships. Point is, all these things carry emotional risks: you’ve got heartbreak, loneliness, excruciating boredom—this is just the human condition. And no matter what you do, you have to take emotional risks. But as a society, we could make sex less risky for women by ending rape culture and slut-shaming, and instituting all-you-can-eat birth control. Hence, you know, feminism. And there are also things that we can do as individuals to be safer, kinder, and more responsible. If you do choose to have casual sex, things are gonna go a lot better for you and your partners if you try to remain honest, open and communicative about what your intentions are. And for God’s sake, use a condom—do not get pregnant or get anyone else pregnant. That’s a real downer, this… echoing God’s act of creation by bringing new life into the world. It’s disgusting!”

Natalie Wynn ContraPoints

ContraPoints, Feminism Did Not Destroy Atheism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klfH9QaEcqY (2016), Is Casual Sex Bad for Your Soul? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKrbvLkbHu8 (2017)

Baby, God, Making love, Loneliness

“For it must be remembered that there was a time when no set of beings tyrannized and terrorized the planet as do the reigning cutthroats to-day. Estimate finally, if you can, and history will help you, the amount of bloodshed and war and woe necessary to develop those unfinished Troglodytes into beings clever enough to write history and invent gin and originate the hope of heaven. Compute these totalities, and you will know what it has cost to teach you and me and the rest to talk politics and wax sarcastic with our fore limbs in the air. Question: If it has required two or three millions of species struggling for life twenty millions of years to produce a being barely above derision, how long will it take and how many millions of species to evolve a being as nearly divine as the average man thinks he is?”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Derivation of the Nature of Living Beings, pp. 191–192

Time, History, Question, War

“Of course, Socialism is violently denounced by the capitalist press and by all the brood of subsidized contributors to magazine literature, but this only confirms the view that the advance of Socialism is very properly recognized by the capitalist class as the one cloud upon the horizon which portends an end to the system in which they have waxed fat, insolent and despotic through the exploitation of their countless wage-working slaves.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

Outlook for Socialism in the United States (1900)

Literature

“Discover how Kapoor’s continual experimentation with structure and medium has led him to work with a wide variety of materials from clay, fibreglass and paint pigment, to steel and wax, creating beautiful, strange and intriguing works that counter conventional ideas of art.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

The Museum of Contemporary Art on Kapoor’s first major exhibition in Australia.
Exhibition: Anish Kapoor

Idea, Beauty, Painting, Art

“Men and women will never understand each other; my advice is to just stop trying. Just forget it. I know I will never understand women. I will never understand how you can take boiling hot wax, pour it onto your upper thigh, rip the hair out by the root…and still be afraid of a spider.”

Jerry Seinfeld (1954) American comedian and actor

I'm Telling You for the Last Time (1998)

Forgetting, Understanding, Women, Men

“Persons whom I saw thirty years ago and with whom I was intimate now appear on the page, and this compels me to declare that The Story of the Stone is a book of the deepest feelings and the truest words. Unless, however, one has in fact experienced such events or been deluded by such feelings, reading it is like "chewing wax" absentmindedly, never understanding the miraculous wonders of what one has witnessed.”

Zhiyanzhai

Comment in the 1760 manuscript of Dream of the Red Chamber, as quoted by Anthony C. Yu in Rereading the Stone (Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 7

Reading, Understanding, Personality, Appearance

“A book is like a man — clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.”

John Steinbeck book Journal of a Novel

From a letter to Pascal Covici (1952)
Journal of a Novel (1969)

Flowers, Books, Sun, Beauty

Quotes about wax page 2

Quotes about wax
page 2